Ubuntu 10.10 Message and Sound Indicator Updates

The indicator menus have seen some more slight improvements in the latest updates and they’re beginning to take shape nicely!

Messaging Menu Highlights

Messaging Menu updates bring highlighted message counts!

The new updates to the Messaging Menu have brought highlighted message counts so that new messages can be easily recognized. The updates aren’t final and have caused a slight misalignment (as you can see on the left margin of the menu), but they do look promising!

I was unaware that this change was in the pipeline, but I must say that I fully approve.

I suspect that the next step will be to configure a color change for the bubbles and text for when the menu entry is hovered, as the bubble and text are hardly legible in this instance.

Notice the difficulty in reading the message count.

Sound Menu Playlists

Menu updates bring Playlists into the picture.

You’ve probably seen, in my previous posts regarding the sound menu, that Playlist integration has been planned from the beginning. Only recently have the signs of inclusion seen the light of day.

The new Playlist sub-menu looks to be very promising and a real time saver if you’re the type of person to create mood-lists.

That being said, it looks to be a while longer before your listed Playlists are of any use. The current listed Playlists as seen in the image above are apparently faux placeholders until the real code to embed them in menus is written and committed.

Sound Menu Play Buttons

In the latest updates, I also notice that the selected hot spots for the play buttons (previous, play/pause, next) have changed. Looking through the code last week I found the code behind the buttons and they are temporarily rectangular hot spots rather than shaped to form the visible buttons.

Seeing this, I spent a short bit of time writing a fix and submitted a potential patch for this to LaunchPad. In the latest updates, they’ve not yet included my patch or written their own fix, but the rectangular hot spots have been fine tuned a bit.

If you’re waiting for features to be completed or have found a nagging bug, I encourage you to download the source code, fix it and submit a patch! After all, this is what Open Source is all about!

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